Old School Dating

Not the kind of dating you might be thinking of.  But dating documents with a rubber stamp.  Millennials are familiar with the term "rubber stamping" but more likely will not know where its origin came from.  This was one of my early efforts taken in 2011.  It was more or less a test shot.  I have just purchased the Canon 60D and the Zeiss Planar T 50.  I wanted to get an industrial look so I brought the lens as close as possible to the subject.  No macro attachments.  This lens is so amazing.  Hand held with all settings on manual including focus.

Hope your day is going well.

Lo-fi Wild Flowers

Sometimes I wonder why I use expensive camera equipment to get real sharp and nice color image, only to render the final image as though it had been taken on a grainy film with a cheap camera with plastic lens.  For the record, the image was taken with a Zeiss Zeiss Planar T 1.4/50 lens mounted on a Canon 60D.  The camera was set on a Manfrotto tripod.  Camera settings were at iso 100, f/1.8, 1/500 sec, manual focus.  Try getting that setting on a cheap Holga.  And yet at the end of the day, I decided to process the image as though it was taken with a film camera that would give a bit of fuzziness and grain.  This is a method that most non-photographers will never understand.

Hope your day is going well.

Reflection at Frederiksberg Palace

Frederiksberg Palace  (not to be confused with Fredericksborg Castle) is a Baroque residence, located in Frederiksberg, Denmark, adjacent to the Copenhagen Zoo. It commands an impressive view over Frederiksberg Gardens, originally designed as a palace garden in the Baroque style. Constructed and extended from 1699 to 1735, the palace served as the royal family’s summer residence until the mid-19th century. Since 1869, it has housed the Royal Danish Military Academy.

As crown prince, Frederick IV had broadened his education by travelling in Europe. He was particularly impressed by the architecture in Italy and, on his return to Denmark, asked his father, Christian V, for permission to build a summer palace on Solbjerg as the hill in Valby was then known.

Juzno is still under the weather but he thought it might cheer his spirit if he go back to photo editing.  To his shock, majority of the image files that were cataloged in Lightroom were missing.  It must have been wiped out when he updated to the latest version of Lightroom.  The whole revelation made his illness worse.  Oh well, he thought, it is what it is.  Que sera sera.

Hope you are having a wonderful weekend.

On the Way to Geiranger

I believed we were still in Sognefjord at this time.  On the way to Geirnager.  Norway is the most scenic of the Scandinavian countries.  The weather changes rapidly depending on where one is.  This image reveals the snow cap mountains.  A few miles after, the snow would disappear and it is replaced by the green landscape.

Right now, Juzno is not feeling so well.  Perhaps coming down with a flu and maybe exacerbated by developing an allergy to the Texan weather, commonly called ad the Cedar Fever.  So for the time being, there might not be any new posts on this blog.

Thank you for your visits.

Leikanger Commune

The Leikanger Commune is located on the north side of the Sognefjorden, the king of the fjords.  A charming little farming village in Norway.  The industry in Norway is mostly agricultural and is subsidized by the government.  A farmer cannot just sell his farm to anybody but his or her eldest son or daughter.  If the son or daughter does not want to buy the farm, it is sold to the next in line, and so on.  When nobody wants to take over the farm, only then can it be sold to an outsider.  The paperwork is pretty lengthy from what I'm told.  Also, the farm cannot be used for anything else except for farming the original crop.  For example, the buyer cannot plant potatoes if the farm was producing barley.

Hope you enjoy.   

Ice Plant LBO

Found this just today.  I might have posted this image some time ago.  It's an old one I shot in 2010 using the Original Lensbaby mounted on a crappy 8 megapixel Canon Rebel XT.  Everything was shot manually including the focus, the shutter speed and aperture.  Surprisingly, I managed to get a decent shot here considering I was just starting to get serious into photography at that time.  I learned so much about capturing images using the Lensbaby.  Focusing is selective and very difficult.  Everything had to be captured using manual settings.  The Lensbaby would not communicate with the DLSR.  So it forces one to persevere or give up.  As for me, I was loving the process and the results.

Hope your day is going well

Last Days of the Sunflowers

The wild sunflowers on our front yard have grown taller than us and our olive trees.  It was time to chop them off before they got out of control.  We had to do the gig quickly as the weather was unforgivingly hot.  After a few minutes, I thought I was going to have a heat stroke.

The image above are some of the flowers I managed to cut from their branches.  They make for great photo op but they usually won't last long.

Hope your day is going well.

Old meets the New in Kaupmannahǫfn

I love the eclectic character of this image.  Captured in Copenhagen, Denmark.  The old building represents the old era - brick walls and pompous tower that sits in juxtaposition next to the turn-of-the-century lamp at the center and the modern scaffolding behind it.  Where else but only in Europe can one find these elements in the same context.  

Copenhagen's name reflects its origin as a harbour and a place of commerce. The original designation in Old Norse, from which Danish descends was Kaupmannahǫfn.  Now try enunciating that as fast as you can.  Kaupmannahǫfn.. Kaupmannahǫfn... kfrprhhmmmffffnn... kpfttttttt....

Hope your day is going well.

Still Life with Cider at Leikanger

Our hostess treated us with cider at the Leikanger Commune in Sognefjord.  I liked the ambiance here.  Even though this was shot inside a house at daytime, the window lighting and the relatively dark room gave the elements a vintage mood.  Sort of like a scene from one of Ingmar Bergman’s later movies.

Hope you enjoy.